As competition between financial institutions increases there is a growing need for financial institutions to identify opportunities to sell a wider range of their products to existing clients. For example, due to recent regulatory changes, traditional banks have a wider range of products and services--including investment products and services--to offer to customers. The need to quickly and accurately identify a marketing opportunity for a specific customer based upon information about the customer is of great importance to financial institutions.
A financial institution may have a great deal of useful information about its customers to be used, in part, for identifying opportunities for marketing additional products and services to its customers. However, the process of sifting through this information to identify marketing opportunities for each specific customer is daunting and time-consuming.
Further, historically the nature of the interaction between customers and financial institution is not conducive to researching and acting on marketing opportunities by representatives of a financial institution. For example, if the institution is a bank, the interaction time for a traditional bank/customer event (for example, depositing a check, getting cash and/or transferring funds) is simply too short to provide the financial institution's representative ample opportunity to meaningfully analyze the customer information and act upon such any analysis.
Further, the nature of the information generally available to the representative of a financial institution may not be conducive to identifying marketing opportunities. For example, if the institution is a bank, a teller generally has access to the customer's current information. This information may be characterized as a "snapshot" of the customer's current status with the bank. Because this type of information is "static" in that it shows the customer's current status, it cannot show the trends of the customer over time. However, analyzing a customer's activity over time can identify important trends. For example, if the number of checks a customer writes starts to decrease, this trend may be indicative that the customer is moving his or her banking business to another institution. Identification of this trend is of real importance to the bank because the bank may wish to take action to dissuade the customer from taking his or her business elsewhere. However, because when dealing with the customer, the representative may not have ready access to information about a customer over time, the ability of the representative to perform a "dynamic" analysis to identify trends is hampered.
As used herein, the term "product" is not limited to a physical entity and is meant to include financial services of any kind including investment services, brokerage services, stock purchases, financial instrument purchases, mortgages, purchases of certificates of deposit (CD's), safety deposit box rentals, electronic home banking--through a personal computer, screen phone or other electronic means--and loans of all kinds including home improvement loans, student loans, car loans and others.
Therefore, there is a need in the industry for a method and system to access and analyze information about the customers of a financial institution in order to identify opportunities to expand business with those customers. Further, there is a need to communicate those opportunities to the representatives of the financial institution in a timely and concise way.